You can't buy that much storage and not affect the market.
You'd be surprised. I know somebody who was buying drives for data storage for a government operation (non-classified), and he was calling big storage vendors with VERY large orders - think rows of racks of drives. Apparently he also had access to guaranteed pre-flood pricing (this was a few years ago).
I mentioned a Frontline episode to him where they talked about a government experiment that involved parking a drone over a town and recording video of the entire town for a month. This used a VERY high-resolution capture device that basically gave you enough resolution to follow every person and car around the town simultaneously (this wasn't pan/zoom - it captured everything at once). It was likely at least tens of gigapixels of full motion video, and they were both able to uplink it from the drone and capture it all. The guy just smiled.
The entire internet is a pretty tall order, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did it. I'm sure they'd whitelist stuff like youtube/netflix and get rid of quite a bit of the noise. However, think of the utility of being able to identify a person of interest and then look back at every packet they ever sent, and every packet ever sent by any machine he communicated with, and so on. That's the real power of universal stored surveillance - you can run the tape backwards and connect all kinds of dots. Sure, your criminal/terrorist network might be able to pull off a sneak attack, but now every person remotely associated with it is exposed.
The US certainly isn't there yet, but it is only a matter of time before it is.
Not that you shouldn't use stored procs, etc but you shouldn't become obsessed over it either.
THIS.
I'd go a step further and say simply never use stored procs. They really cement you into exactly one platform. If you write your code to be DB-agnostic then you're going to have a LOT more flexibility down the road. Oh, and that isn't just flexibility to change DB Vendors - even Oracle has been known to deprecate some of their stuff and if you relied on them that means a lot of rework. If you rely on ANSI SQL you can pretty-much guarantee that it will still work (if you use it right - like not assuming that an unordered query returns results in some particular order).
Some programmers just don't grok SQL either. I can't tell you how many queries I've seen that are implemented with either a wall of SQL, or even a stored procedure, that could be expressed as maybe 10 lines of well-indented SQL written properly. I've seen subqueries nested 10 levels deep that implement simple inner joins - they're worse than trying to read compiler output (especially when nobody bothers to format them). Hint, if your query contains the expression "WHERE 1" a dozen times you're probably doing something wrong.
Well, the problem with SQL is that the only universal standard is so old that it doesn't do half the stuff people want to do with it. That and laziness - there are things that could be done in ANSI SQL but the syntax ends up being arcane or verbose and people would rather write something short in a non-standard extension.
Ideally, it'd be nice if more developers would write their application to use some of the database abstraction layers that are out there (PEAR, ADOdb, etc.). At least then users would be able to merely use the database they may already have installed.
THAT I'll agree with. That is a real failing on Linux - on Windows developers were encouraged to use such frameworks from the start. In the FOSS world every was encouraged to link to some DB-specific library and use DB-specific syntax. One proprietary piece of software at work supports anything that supports ANSI SQL and ODBC - you could run it with just about any DB back-end you want. Java has JDBC. The exact framework doesn't matter as much as the fact that one gets used.
As a general rule of thumb, if you need something lightweight, SQLite is the way to go. If you need something more powerful or sophisticated than that, PostgreSQL.>
If I were ever writing something new I'd almost certainly use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL/MariaDB. The problem is that I end up using MySQL for almost everything anyway, because few FOSS projects actually support PostgreSQL If they did it would be a no-brainer.
Because frankly, 100.000 fluorescent fixtures is a tiny order for manufacturing that is going on Chinese scale right now. Most will simply not want to take it.
I can't speak to the first half of your post, but this line reminds me of a funny story I heard from some guy in government circles. Apparently the US Military wanted to make their own smartphones (all the obvious benefits of consumer technology, but secured for military use). They tried to pitch this to some smartphone manufacturers bragging about how due to the purchasing power of the military they could offer an order of a million devices. The smartphone vendors all chuckled and pointed out that they wouldn't consider making a phone that they didn't think could sell a fair part of that every day.
Sadly, what you say is absolutely true, at least if you are only interested in shorterm profit.
Maybe if you define "short term" as a decade. Look at Apple - 95% of what the company has done is marketing. Sure, their products aren't bad, but they sell their products for several times what competing products that exceed them on features sell for. They're just an easy example.
People are sheep - they buy what the ads on TV tell them to buy, because that is what will impress their friends, or get them girls, or make them look like the model on TV, or whatever it is that motivates them. As you pointed out, it is easy to sell snake oil.
GNU/Linux is just a made up word. We could just as well call the combination of GNU and Linux as Fred, that doesn't mean that we have to call everything that combines GNU and Linux as Fred. It's just something that someone made up.
I never said you had to call GNU/Linux GNU/Linux. I just said that Ubuntu is GNU/Linux, er, Fred.
I'd think that a distributed passive RF detection system would be more useful.
Just about any aircraft reflects radio waves (even stealth aircraft - they just reflect them away from the transmitter). In theory passive devices could capture RF like a radar and look for reflections, and a bunch of these in different places could determine the position of any aircraft that reflects RF. That would likely have a range much larger than sound.
Well, I suspect that in a few years the thing will basically tell you that there is a drone overhead 24x7. So, those with tinfoil hats basically will end up never going outside.
Are missles accurate from that altitude? I would expect the maximum firing altitude to be much lower than the maximum crusing altitude. While the device in question might not help much if you are being spied on by a drone, it seems possible that you could hear one which might be shooting at you soon. It is also worth mentioning that the operating celing is measured in feet above sea level, and a drone flying over the mountains in Pakistan is much closer to the ground.
Well, I think the concern is domestic use, where missiles are unlikely to be a concern.
However, I'd think that a missile would basically have infinite range downwards - it just has to fall. The main issue would be the range at which the seeker could acquire the laser spot. If the missile has gyros (seems likely) it could in theory be just directed along an arbitrary trajectory until it acquires the laser spot as well, which would extend the range beyond what it could actually see. That's what laser-guided bombs do - the plane drops them just like a dumb bomb at a particular location, and then the bomb just falls until it spots a laser and then it seeks. Often the laser isn't even turned on when it is first dropped.
GNU is not important enough to the average Ubuntu user that the operating system should be called GNU/Linux.
I'm not saying that it should be called GNU/Linux. I'm simply stating that it IS GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is a set of operating systems that run a Linux kernel with a large number of GNU userland utilities on top (like glibc, bash, etc).
Based upon that definition Ubuntu fits into that category. I could care less whether they want to advertise that or whatever. If you want to quibble over the definition, quibble away. When I use the term "GNU/Linux" that is what it means. Feel free to use it differently if you wish.
They're working on neurological DRM. Pretty soon you'll go to the movies and leave talking about how much you enjoyed it, without actually knowing what the story was about or who the actors were, but with a general desire to buy products made by Coca Cola.
Well, I imagine they might be useful for solving some esoteric encryption problems. Imagine I have a document that is digitally signed by somebody you trust, but I don't want to share the whole thing with you. I want to redact the document, and then have the non-redacted parts still be signed. Maybe functions like these might let me derive a new signature for the redacted content in a way that tells the recipient that the unredacted part is valid, but that it wasn't the original either.
I don't know that anybody has come up with a way to solve that particular problem - I just use it as an example of the sort of case where being able to manipulate encrypted data without a key could be useful. There are lots of cases where you want groups of people to be able to work with data where no individual has all the keys, but some group of individuals can still read it, and this falls into the same sort of category of interesting techniques that might solve very particular problems.
GNU/Linux is not an operating system. It's something that some distributions call themselves, like Debian. Ubuntu on the other hand is not GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the sense that Android is an OS - both really describe a family of related OSes. Ubuntu certainly qualifies as GNU/Linux, at least at present. What they call themselves is irrelevant. Samsung doesn't really mention Android in much of its advertising, but that doesn't mean that they don't make Android phones (among others).
Well, lots of people do work hourly jobs where this isn't an issue. But, yes, I agree with everything you said in the professional world.
At my workplace the guy who gets FMLA leave for a month and the guy who slips out to go golfing 10 hours per week for four months basically get treated the same by the system. The same is true of somebody who gets sick/disabled, or who ends up sequestered on a jury for a year. They'll never fire you while you're on leave (especially a legally-guaranteed leave). However, they won't give you a big bonus the next year for sure, and when the next re-org/layoff comes you will be near the bottom of the ranking. When they fire you it won't be "for serving jury duty" - it will be because "we just don't need so many people."
At some level this is actually a good thing, because it gives employees more flexibility - my boss really could care less if I take vacation, and so on. The bad thing is that basically it leads to people never REALLY going on vacation - they end up working in spurts or killing themselves to get back. Forced ranking often also lead to situations where the person who just went through a divorce ends up getting fired for something that likely has no bearing whatsoever on their future productivity.
Noone uses TV out anymore since HDMI/digital video has taken over.
I was using it on an Nvidia mini-ITX motherboard only a few months ago. It won't be obsolete until the last analog TV dies. Considering that TVs last about a decade and HD only really took over a few years ago I'd say that TV-out has at least a few years left in it. That said, other than 2D codec support I doubt there is that much need for acceleration. The main use case for TV-out is to hook a PC up to a TV as a media player.
by chipping in $50-100/mo to pay for a fraction of your service plan, they get up to 20 hours per week of additional work out of you
Do you really think they'll be giving you $50-100 per month?
If they're anything like my employer they only way they would give you anything is if you get charged by the megabyte for going over your limit, and then only for data consumed in the course of business. Never mind that you blew through half your plan with business data and then incurred a ton of costs for personal browsing once you were over quota - that doesn't count, and that business use was "free." That's what happens at my employer if you have to dial into an important call at the start of the month and run out of minutes for personal use at the end of the month - they'd just say that you shouldn't have made so many personal calls on your own phone/plan.
I'll do BYOD when it is my choice of phone, my choice of OS, my choice of software, and I'm the only admin on the phone. Yes, I understand all the reasons why this isn't acceptable to employers, which is why I don't insist on them supporting my phone. However, I certainly won't give them access to it under other conditions.
BINGO! and that is why I carry TWO devices. Work stuff is done on Work provided equipment, personal stuff (like Slashdot posts) from personal equipment. I do little "lunchtime surfing" from work machines anymore. That's been the "best practice" the last 5 years or so...
Why would a company provide you with equipment when they can coerce you to buying it for them? That's basically the issue here. They'll tell you that you don't need to carry two phones - but what most don't realize is that the phone you're giving up isn't the extra company-provided one but rather the personal one. You're just still paying for it.
I'm as big a fan of the iPhone as anyone, but the tools you mention don't work for BYOD.
What you aren't getting is that "Bring Your Own Device" really just means "Pay For The Company's Device."
The company treats it like they own it. They get admin access. They lock the user from setting preferences (like screen lock settings, etc). They wipe it if they decide they don't need you any longer. They specify what kind of device you can bring.
Basically you're buying a device, then leasing it free of charge to the company for the duration of your employment. You get it back when you quit.
Bollocks. CSS was designed to separate styling from structure in web pages. It does this admirably, and only needs to be a declarative language to do so.
Bollocks. Every configuration file should be Turing complete. -- The Sendmail Authors.
..which then turns it into a solar sail and it floats away...
No moreso than the 3.5M mirror would. The force of solar flux on an object depends only on its surface area, I believe. The resulting acceleration depends on its mass as well, of course. The mirror would be much heavier than the mylar reflector, but mylar and a bug lump of rock/metal would be WAY cheaper than a telescope mirror.
Any ship that wants to use solar power need to deal with the problem of being a solar sail. That problem also only matters in certain scenarios. If you're orbiting something, then over time the outward thrust of the sun will basically cancel itself out (it is pushing you one way on one side of the sun, and the other way on the other side of the sun).
So what you actually do is you have a shield to keep the sun away from the rest of the satellite (you need that anyway) and with a little work you can also keep much of the solar wind away too.
Well, sort-of. The problem is that your shield will also radiate energy as it will eventually be in equilibrium with its surroundings, so your shield won't actually shield you from anything (hot particles hit shield, warm it up, and then shield emits many more cooler particles that hit your spacecraft and warm it up).
Then, you have two parts: one is a big-ass radiator that exploits the difference with the CMB, and the other is your instrument package which you need to cool, and where you need a heat pump to do it.
A heat pump might work with solar power. I'm not sure how much energy that would consume though, and what the relative costs/benefits of that vs a fixed coolant supply are.
SpaceX should go after it and salvage it robotically for use as a solar thermal concentrator. 3.5M mirrors that are already in space don't exactly grow on trees.
I'm not sure why you'd need a telescope mirror for use as a thermal concentrator. Why not just use some big fold-out mylar reflector? It could be WAY larger, cheaper, and lighter.
Sure, it won't focus light to a point way smaller than a wavelength of light, but that really isn't necessary if all you want to do is heat something up. What really matters is having as much power striking your collector as possible, which means making it big.
You would have to move the heat to a massive radiator and wait a long time for it to cool due to radiation.
Even then, you could only get it down to the temperature of the surrounding space. That is actually pretty warm inside the solar system (even warmer than liquid nitrogen), and I suspect that it would be too warm even in cosmic voids for something like this - somebody set off this REALLY hot explosion a few billion years ago and space will never quite cool off completely as a result.
If space actually was cold enough, then chances are the telescope would be useless anyway, because everything it would want to take pictures of would be colder as well.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.
The word "nearly" isn't nearly good enough for this kind of application. If you want a mirror to operate at 1K, then you need to radiate heat to something colder than 1K if you passively cool it. Your infinite heat sink is considerably warmer than this.
Think about it - you want to take pictures of stuff that is only slightly warmer than deep space. To do so your mirrors have to be much colder than deep space otherwise you'll just get a picture of your mirror. It would be like trying to take a picture outside while shining a spotlight into the camera.
Liquid helium at low pressures has a VERY low boiling point. Few technologies can achieve these kinds of temperatures, and most aren't really applicable to big objects like mirrors (cooling individual atoms with lasers, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
You can't buy that much storage and not affect the market.
You'd be surprised. I know somebody who was buying drives for data storage for a government operation (non-classified), and he was calling big storage vendors with VERY large orders - think rows of racks of drives. Apparently he also had access to guaranteed pre-flood pricing (this was a few years ago).
I mentioned a Frontline episode to him where they talked about a government experiment that involved parking a drone over a town and recording video of the entire town for a month. This used a VERY high-resolution capture device that basically gave you enough resolution to follow every person and car around the town simultaneously (this wasn't pan/zoom - it captured everything at once). It was likely at least tens of gigapixels of full motion video, and they were both able to uplink it from the drone and capture it all. The guy just smiled.
The entire internet is a pretty tall order, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did it. I'm sure they'd whitelist stuff like youtube/netflix and get rid of quite a bit of the noise. However, think of the utility of being able to identify a person of interest and then look back at every packet they ever sent, and every packet ever sent by any machine he communicated with, and so on. That's the real power of universal stored surveillance - you can run the tape backwards and connect all kinds of dots. Sure, your criminal/terrorist network might be able to pull off a sneak attack, but now every person remotely associated with it is exposed.
The US certainly isn't there yet, but it is only a matter of time before it is.
Not that you shouldn't use stored procs, etc but you shouldn't become obsessed over it either.
THIS.
I'd go a step further and say simply never use stored procs. They really cement you into exactly one platform. If you write your code to be DB-agnostic then you're going to have a LOT more flexibility down the road. Oh, and that isn't just flexibility to change DB Vendors - even Oracle has been known to deprecate some of their stuff and if you relied on them that means a lot of rework. If you rely on ANSI SQL you can pretty-much guarantee that it will still work (if you use it right - like not assuming that an unordered query returns results in some particular order).
Some programmers just don't grok SQL either. I can't tell you how many queries I've seen that are implemented with either a wall of SQL, or even a stored procedure, that could be expressed as maybe 10 lines of well-indented SQL written properly. I've seen subqueries nested 10 levels deep that implement simple inner joins - they're worse than trying to read compiler output (especially when nobody bothers to format them). Hint, if your query contains the expression "WHERE 1" a dozen times you're probably doing something wrong.
Standards, shmandards.
Well, the problem with SQL is that the only universal standard is so old that it doesn't do half the stuff people want to do with it. That and laziness - there are things that could be done in ANSI SQL but the syntax ends up being arcane or verbose and people would rather write something short in a non-standard extension.
Ideally, it'd be nice if more developers would write their application to use some of the database abstraction layers that are out there (PEAR, ADOdb, etc.). At least then users would be able to merely use the database they may already have installed.
THAT I'll agree with. That is a real failing on Linux - on Windows developers were encouraged to use such frameworks from the start. In the FOSS world every was encouraged to link to some DB-specific library and use DB-specific syntax. One proprietary piece of software at work supports anything that supports ANSI SQL and ODBC - you could run it with just about any DB back-end you want. Java has JDBC. The exact framework doesn't matter as much as the fact that one gets used.
As a general rule of thumb, if you need something lightweight, SQLite is the way to go. If you need something more powerful or sophisticated than that, PostgreSQL.>
If I were ever writing something new I'd almost certainly use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL/MariaDB. The problem is that I end up using MySQL for almost everything anyway, because few FOSS projects actually support PostgreSQL If they did it would be a no-brainer.
Because frankly, 100.000 fluorescent fixtures is a tiny order for manufacturing that is going on Chinese scale right now. Most will simply not want to take it.
I can't speak to the first half of your post, but this line reminds me of a funny story I heard from some guy in government circles. Apparently the US Military wanted to make their own smartphones (all the obvious benefits of consumer technology, but secured for military use). They tried to pitch this to some smartphone manufacturers bragging about how due to the purchasing power of the military they could offer an order of a million devices. The smartphone vendors all chuckled and pointed out that they wouldn't consider making a phone that they didn't think could sell a fair part of that every day.
Sadly, what you say is absolutely true, at least if you are only interested in shorterm profit.
Maybe if you define "short term" as a decade. Look at Apple - 95% of what the company has done is marketing. Sure, their products aren't bad, but they sell their products for several times what competing products that exceed them on features sell for. They're just an easy example.
People are sheep - they buy what the ads on TV tell them to buy, because that is what will impress their friends, or get them girls, or make them look like the model on TV, or whatever it is that motivates them. As you pointed out, it is easy to sell snake oil.
GNU/Linux is just a made up word. We could just as well call the combination of GNU and Linux as Fred, that doesn't mean that we have to call everything that combines GNU and Linux as Fred. It's just something that someone made up.
I never said you had to call GNU/Linux GNU/Linux. I just said that Ubuntu is GNU/Linux, er, Fred.
I'd think that a distributed passive RF detection system would be more useful.
Just about any aircraft reflects radio waves (even stealth aircraft - they just reflect them away from the transmitter). In theory passive devices could capture RF like a radar and look for reflections, and a bunch of these in different places could determine the position of any aircraft that reflects RF. That would likely have a range much larger than sound.
Well, I suspect that in a few years the thing will basically tell you that there is a drone overhead 24x7. So, those with tinfoil hats basically will end up never going outside.
Are missles accurate from that altitude? I would expect the maximum firing altitude to be much lower than the maximum crusing altitude. While the device in question might not help much if you are being spied on by a drone, it seems possible that you could hear one which might be shooting at you soon. It is also worth mentioning that the operating celing is measured in feet above sea level, and a drone flying over the mountains in Pakistan is much closer to the ground.
Well, I think the concern is domestic use, where missiles are unlikely to be a concern.
However, I'd think that a missile would basically have infinite range downwards - it just has to fall. The main issue would be the range at which the seeker could acquire the laser spot. If the missile has gyros (seems likely) it could in theory be just directed along an arbitrary trajectory until it acquires the laser spot as well, which would extend the range beyond what it could actually see. That's what laser-guided bombs do - the plane drops them just like a dumb bomb at a particular location, and then the bomb just falls until it spots a laser and then it seeks. Often the laser isn't even turned on when it is first dropped.
GNU is not important enough to the average Ubuntu user that the operating system should be called GNU/Linux.
I'm not saying that it should be called GNU/Linux. I'm simply stating that it IS GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is a set of operating systems that run a Linux kernel with a large number of GNU userland utilities on top (like glibc, bash, etc).
Based upon that definition Ubuntu fits into that category. I could care less whether they want to advertise that or whatever. If you want to quibble over the definition, quibble away. When I use the term "GNU/Linux" that is what it means. Feel free to use it differently if you wish.
They're working on neurological DRM. Pretty soon you'll go to the movies and leave talking about how much you enjoyed it, without actually knowing what the story was about or who the actors were, but with a general desire to buy products made by Coca Cola.
Well, I imagine they might be useful for solving some esoteric encryption problems. Imagine I have a document that is digitally signed by somebody you trust, but I don't want to share the whole thing with you. I want to redact the document, and then have the non-redacted parts still be signed. Maybe functions like these might let me derive a new signature for the redacted content in a way that tells the recipient that the unredacted part is valid, but that it wasn't the original either.
I don't know that anybody has come up with a way to solve that particular problem - I just use it as an example of the sort of case where being able to manipulate encrypted data without a key could be useful. There are lots of cases where you want groups of people to be able to work with data where no individual has all the keys, but some group of individuals can still read it, and this falls into the same sort of category of interesting techniques that might solve very particular problems.
GNU/Linux is not an operating system. It's something that some distributions call themselves, like Debian. Ubuntu on the other hand is not GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the sense that Android is an OS - both really describe a family of related OSes. Ubuntu certainly qualifies as GNU/Linux, at least at present. What they call themselves is irrelevant. Samsung doesn't really mention Android in much of its advertising, but that doesn't mean that they don't make Android phones (among others).
Well, lots of people do work hourly jobs where this isn't an issue. But, yes, I agree with everything you said in the professional world.
At my workplace the guy who gets FMLA leave for a month and the guy who slips out to go golfing 10 hours per week for four months basically get treated the same by the system. The same is true of somebody who gets sick/disabled, or who ends up sequestered on a jury for a year. They'll never fire you while you're on leave (especially a legally-guaranteed leave). However, they won't give you a big bonus the next year for sure, and when the next re-org/layoff comes you will be near the bottom of the ranking. When they fire you it won't be "for serving jury duty" - it will be because "we just don't need so many people."
At some level this is actually a good thing, because it gives employees more flexibility - my boss really could care less if I take vacation, and so on. The bad thing is that basically it leads to people never REALLY going on vacation - they end up working in spurts or killing themselves to get back. Forced ranking often also lead to situations where the person who just went through a divorce ends up getting fired for something that likely has no bearing whatsoever on their future productivity.
Noone uses TV out anymore since HDMI/digital video has taken over.
I was using it on an Nvidia mini-ITX motherboard only a few months ago. It won't be obsolete until the last analog TV dies. Considering that TVs last about a decade and HD only really took over a few years ago I'd say that TV-out has at least a few years left in it. That said, other than 2D codec support I doubt there is that much need for acceleration. The main use case for TV-out is to hook a PC up to a TV as a media player.
by chipping in $50-100/mo to pay for a fraction of your service plan, they get up to 20 hours per week of additional work out of you
Do you really think they'll be giving you $50-100 per month?
If they're anything like my employer they only way they would give you anything is if you get charged by the megabyte for going over your limit, and then only for data consumed in the course of business. Never mind that you blew through half your plan with business data and then incurred a ton of costs for personal browsing once you were over quota - that doesn't count, and that business use was "free." That's what happens at my employer if you have to dial into an important call at the start of the month and run out of minutes for personal use at the end of the month - they'd just say that you shouldn't have made so many personal calls on your own phone/plan.
I'll do BYOD when it is my choice of phone, my choice of OS, my choice of software, and I'm the only admin on the phone. Yes, I understand all the reasons why this isn't acceptable to employers, which is why I don't insist on them supporting my phone. However, I certainly won't give them access to it under other conditions.
BINGO! and that is why I carry TWO devices. Work stuff is done on Work provided equipment, personal stuff (like Slashdot posts) from personal equipment. I do little "lunchtime surfing" from work machines anymore. That's been the "best practice" the last 5 years or so...
Why would a company provide you with equipment when they can coerce you to buying it for them? That's basically the issue here. They'll tell you that you don't need to carry two phones - but what most don't realize is that the phone you're giving up isn't the extra company-provided one but rather the personal one. You're just still paying for it.
I'm as big a fan of the iPhone as anyone, but the tools you mention don't work for BYOD.
What you aren't getting is that "Bring Your Own Device" really just means "Pay For The Company's Device."
The company treats it like they own it. They get admin access. They lock the user from setting preferences (like screen lock settings, etc). They wipe it if they decide they don't need you any longer. They specify what kind of device you can bring.
Basically you're buying a device, then leasing it free of charge to the company for the duration of your employment. You get it back when you quit.
Bollocks. CSS was designed to separate styling from structure in web pages. It does this admirably, and only needs to be a declarative language to do so.
Bollocks. Every configuration file should be Turing complete. -- The Sendmail Authors.
..which then turns it into a solar sail and it floats away...
No moreso than the 3.5M mirror would. The force of solar flux on an object depends only on its surface area, I believe. The resulting acceleration depends on its mass as well, of course. The mirror would be much heavier than the mylar reflector, but mylar and a bug lump of rock/metal would be WAY cheaper than a telescope mirror.
Any ship that wants to use solar power need to deal with the problem of being a solar sail. That problem also only matters in certain scenarios. If you're orbiting something, then over time the outward thrust of the sun will basically cancel itself out (it is pushing you one way on one side of the sun, and the other way on the other side of the sun).
So what you actually do is you have a shield to keep the sun away from the rest of the satellite (you need that anyway) and with a little work you can also keep much of the solar wind away too.
Well, sort-of. The problem is that your shield will also radiate energy as it will eventually be in equilibrium with its surroundings, so your shield won't actually shield you from anything (hot particles hit shield, warm it up, and then shield emits many more cooler particles that hit your spacecraft and warm it up).
Then, you have two parts: one is a big-ass radiator that exploits the difference with the CMB, and the other is your instrument package which you need to cool, and where you need a heat pump to do it.
A heat pump might work with solar power. I'm not sure how much energy that would consume though, and what the relative costs/benefits of that vs a fixed coolant supply are.
SpaceX should go after it and salvage it robotically for use as a solar thermal concentrator. 3.5M mirrors that are already in space don't exactly grow on trees.
I'm not sure why you'd need a telescope mirror for use as a thermal concentrator. Why not just use some big fold-out mylar reflector? It could be WAY larger, cheaper, and lighter.
Sure, it won't focus light to a point way smaller than a wavelength of light, but that really isn't necessary if all you want to do is heat something up. What really matters is having as much power striking your collector as possible, which means making it big.
You would have to move the heat to a massive radiator and wait a long time for it to cool due to radiation.
Even then, you could only get it down to the temperature of the surrounding space. That is actually pretty warm inside the solar system (even warmer than liquid nitrogen), and I suspect that it would be too warm even in cosmic voids for something like this - somebody set off this REALLY hot explosion a few billion years ago and space will never quite cool off completely as a result.
If space actually was cold enough, then chances are the telescope would be useless anyway, because everything it would want to take pictures of would be colder as well.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.
The word "nearly" isn't nearly good enough for this kind of application. If you want a mirror to operate at 1K, then you need to radiate heat to something colder than 1K if you passively cool it. Your infinite heat sink is considerably warmer than this.
Think about it - you want to take pictures of stuff that is only slightly warmer than deep space. To do so your mirrors have to be much colder than deep space otherwise you'll just get a picture of your mirror. It would be like trying to take a picture outside while shining a spotlight into the camera.
Liquid helium at low pressures has a VERY low boiling point. Few technologies can achieve these kinds of temperatures, and most aren't really applicable to big objects like mirrors (cooling individual atoms with lasers, etc).